If you’ve listened to my fantasy football radio show at all (streamed live here on our fantasy football media page), you’ve probably heard me on many occasions mention something called “Fantasy Points per Game”. This is the culmination of breaking down defensive statistics and creating a better way to determine matchups for offensive players each week. But how I do it is a little different from what everyone else uses and I believe far superior. I wrote about this last year in my fantasy football blog and in case you missed you it then, here’s an updated version of the explanation.

Almost all sites list the defensive rankings against the run and pass. And I’m going to get the falsehood of pass defensive rankings in a minute, so stay with me. First I’m going to look at run defenses. It’s just automatically assumed by many that these defensive rankings are the end all for determining the best matchups from your fantasy roster. After all, a defense that ranks 17th against the run should be an easier matchup for a RB than a defense that ranks 10th, right? Not always. The defensive rankings you get everywhere else are determined by one stat: average yards allowed. Now average yards allowed is an important stat. But in most fantasy leagues, we also get points for touchdowns. You remember touchdowns? After all, in your typical fantasy league each touchdown is worth 6 points and is equal to 60 rushing or receiving yards. But the defensive rankings you see everywhere else do not include the amount of touchdowns a team allows to an opponent on the ground or thru the air. That is why they flawed.

I have created a system that incorporates both the rushing yards allowed and the number of rushing touchdowns a defense allows to give us a better set of defensive rankings. Let’s use the example of the 17th ranked run defense vs. that 10th ranked run defense. The Green Bay Packers are currently, thru week 4 of the 2009 season, the NFL’s 17th ranked run defense allowing an average of 112.2 rushing yards per game. The Chicago Bears are the 10th ranked run defense allowing only 93.5 rushing yards per game. On this basis alone, you would think that a RB on your roster facing the Packers would have the better matchup than a RB that is facing the Bears. But when we look at the fact Green Bay has allowed only 2 rushing touchdowns thru 4 games while the Bears have allowed 4, you start to see where the average yards allowed ranking may be flawed in terms of determining best and worst matchups for your fantasy players. By incorporating my system of figuring in the rushing touchdowns allowed by those teams, you get the Rushing Fantasy Points Allowed per Game. And in that, it actually turns that the Green Bay Packers rank 12th overall in Rushing Fantasy Points Allowed per Game while the Bears rank 17th.

The formula I use is fairly simple. You take the total amount of rushing yards a defense has allowed on the season and divide it by 10. Set that total aside for moment. Take the total number of rushing touchdowns that defense has allowed and multiply it by 6. Take the result of that equation, add it to the rushing yards result and then divide the sum by the number of games played. This yields the true average amount of fantasy points allowed per game.

I’ll give an example here of how to apply it using both the Packers and Bears so far this season.

Advantage? The RB facing the Bears. You get, on average, more fantasy points per game. And of course, these rankings are updated every week for every team and by week 9 we have at least 8 games for every team; that’s half the season. By that time the average starts remaining fairly consistent and allows us to identify which RB’s have the best and worst strength of schedule for our fantasy playoff weeks.

Now this also works for passing defense. But again, the rankings you see everywhere else are flawed because they don’t take into account the passing touchdowns allowed. In fact, the passing defense rankings you find everywhere are even more flawed than the run defense rankings because in determining passing defense yardage allowed, every other site out there is using what the NFL calls passing defense. The NFL passing defense rankings take the amount of yards a defense has allowed passing, and then subtracts out the amount of yards a defense gets back when they make a sack on the QB. In other words, if Jay Cutler throws for 300 yards, but gets sacked 4 times and loses a total of 26 yards on those sacks, the defense is credited for only allowing 274 passing yards. Even though they really allowed 300 passing yards, the NFL gives the defense back the yards from all sack totals. Now I can’t say I’ve played in every different type of fantasy football league out there. But I can say that I don’t know of a single league where those sack yardage numbers get counted back against a QB’s fantasy points totals. So how do we get the actual passing yards allowed by a defense without the sack totals? If you go to NFL.com, and go their team stats page, you will see at the bottom a section called “Sortable Stats - by League”. In the “View by defensive category” drop down bar, you can pull up “Receiving”. This will show you the actual amount of passing yards allowed by every defense without the sack yardage taken into consideration. This is the stat that is important for fantasy football owners to use. It’s called Receiving Yards allowed, or as I prefer to call it: Actual Passing Yards allowed.

Now the formula for calculating the Receiving Fantasy Points Allowed per Game is the same as it is for the Rushing FP/PG. You take the total amount of receiving yards a defense has allowed for the season, divide it by 10. Take the total amount of receiving touchdowns allowed, multiply it up by 6. Add the two numbers together and divide it by the number of games played. That will yield the Fantasy Points per Game allowed thru the air and help in determining what WR’s and TE’s have the best or worst matchups.

Currently, using just the Receiving yards allowed, the Bears rank 25th against the pass while the Packers rank 14th. But since Chicago has allowed only 4 passing TD’s this season while the Packers have allowed 9, in terms of Fantasy Points Per Game, The Bears actually rank 16th allowing 31.4 FP/PG while the Packers rank 26th allowing 36.6 FP/PG. Advantage? The WR’s and TE’s playing the Packers.

Now you can also use the Receiving FP/PG for use on your QB matchups. Compiling these lists of Rushing and Receiving Fantasy Points Allowed per Game is actually a lot simpler than it sounds once you get the hang of copying and pasting the raw data into a spreadsheet. NFL.com gives you a bunch of other stat categories within their rushing and receiving defense pages, but you only need to be concerned with 2: Yards and TD’s.

Fantasy Points per Game: simply a better way of determining your matchups than just yards.
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On any given Sunday any fantasy team can beat another, only to still lose Monday night.

Post Date: 10/08/09 15:42
I just use an Excel spreadsheet and copy and paste the information from NFL.com into it. I then reorganize the columns to put the important categories (Yards allowed, avg yards allowed, TD's) so they are next to the teams and then I insert a blank column and start calculating the fantasy points per game. It's not that difficult. I assume there is probably a way to set it up so the system automatically calculates it for me, but I have no clue how to go about that.
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On any given Sunday any fantasy team can beat another, only to still lose Monday night.

Post Date: 10/08/09 16:55
I'm no XL spreadsheet/math wiz by any stretch (I learned to count to four that was enough to be a drummer) and I just but together a spreadsheet based on Russ` formulas in like 30-40 minutes. Once you have the math right copy and past it 31 times then copy and paste the NFL stas. re-sort lowest to highest from the FPPG column and bingo!
Thanks Russ!
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"RSIIBITSI"

Post Date: 10/10/09 06:25
The tools on this site do use both the yardage and TD's allowed against both the pass and run as part of it's algoriithm along with many other things like recent performances, historical performances against specific opponents, etc.

As for posting the rankings derived by this formula, since I use a generic point system for the calculation it wouldn't apply to all leagues. That's one of the strengths of the Analyzer tools: they are scoring system specific and customize the calculations in a way I just can't.
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On any given Sunday any fantasy team can beat another, only to still lose Monday night.

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